Witty and Insightful: Maybe You Should Talk To Someone Book Review

I found the best non-fiction I’ve ever read in my life and I urge you to pick it up too!

Hello everybody. Just your friendly neighborhood lover of fantasy and all things fictitious here, who read a non-fiction recently and now wants to shout about it from the rooftops. I’ve always ran away from non-fiction. They don’t take me out of this depressive borderline dystopian reality nor do they give me a beautiful brilliant world to live in. So what’s the point?

But after reading a few non-fictions this year, like Bad Feminist and Hunger by Roxanne Gay and quite recently, Maybe You Should Talk To Someone, I’ll be making an active effort to read more non-fiction.

Lets get into the review now!

Name: Maybe You Should Talk To Someone
Author: Lori Gottlieb
Pages: 412
Publisher: Amaryllis publishers

One day, Lori Gottlieb is a therapist who helps patients in her Los Angeles practice. The next, a crisis causes her world to come crashing down. Enter Wendell, the quirky but seasoned therapist in whose office she suddenly lands. With his balding head, cardigan, and khakis, he seems to have come straight from Therapist Central Casting. Yet he will turn out to be anything but.

As Gottlieb explores the inner chambers of her patients’ lives — a self-absorbed Hollywood producer, a young newlywed diagnosed with a terminal illness, a senior citizen threatening to end her life on her birthday if nothing gets better, and a twenty-something who can’t stop hooking up with the wrong guys — she finds that the questions they are struggling with are the very ones she is now bringing to Wendell.

My Review

“Besides, aren’t therapists, of all people, supposed to have their lives together?”

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 5 out of 5.

As I turn the last page of the book, there’s this sort of lightness in my chest and dampness on my face. I can’t help smiling and ruminate about what a therapeutic experienced I’d and pondering over something that constantly comes to my mind: would I like to go to therapy someday, not for a specific ailment, but just to get a feel of it?

Mental health is so stigmatized in our country that if an actor dies due to a mental illness, instead of looking for solutions and making a safe space for anyone else suffering from any mental health issue, everyone runs to find a cause or a scapegoat and partake in a witch hunt against a woman, taking voyeuristic pleasure in vilifying her.

I was (still am) quite apprehensive to review this book. Reading it was an experience; an emotional, an insightful and a cathartic one to an extent. How do I review a book, when there’s this seed of doubt in mind, which is burgeoning unlike the plants I water religiously, that I won’t be able to do justice to the sheer humanness of it?

In today’s age, we are so obsessed with stats, finishing one book after the other so we can get to the next one and devour as many as possible before our time is up. But with this book, I took my time; I savored it, went on my own pace, underlined and annotated in abundance, to one day come back to it again maybe.

I’d this conception in my mind, before going into the book that it’s about therapy and how even therapists need their own therapists because of the emotional fatigue they might experience. But it’s about so much more and a bit different from what I imagined.

As opposed to what pop culture might make us believe, therapy is not about just lying on the couch, spilling out everything to a therapist. People don’t just open up at the ping of the timer. Therapy is a process, an arduous journey. There needs to be an establishment of some sort of trust first and a therapist is not a vending machine, that they give an answer on the platter on Day 1.

Why are we so scared of discussing our mental state of mind, the invisible storm brewing in our heads but are quick to divulge our physical health issues and even sex lives? is what Lori starts of with, at the very beginning. She equates therapy with pornography, both of which include some sort of nudity, with million of users, who choose to keep both of them private.

Through the medium of her 4 clients, their lives and painful experiences, along with her own experience with therapy, Lori Gottlieb, a psychotherapist, weaves an utterly human narrative, peeling back layers in order to help her patients reach the deepest and darkest parts of themselves and the deep rooted insecurities, which they are too afraid to confront. She gently steers them in the right direction, making them make sense of their jumbled up thought processes, helping them overcome the obstacles and convincing them that their worth is not associated with the choices they’ve made. In this manner, she compels the readers to the same.

“We may want others’ forgiveness, but the comes from a place of self gratification; we are seeking forgiveness of others to avoid the harder work of forgiving ourselves.”

Source: https://bit.ly/3ijM40Y

She gives us a glimpse into the nature of a therapist’s workings, as well as what people perceive of her, interweaving and alternating between her patients cases, which are unique in their own way, with her own struggles and snippets from her sessions with her therapist, teaching us a lot about compassion and empathy, not only with others but also ourselves, and making us understand our relationship with others around us. She also touches upon the topic of seeking therapy on the basis of gender, in a patriarchal society like ours.

“Men tend to be at a disadvantage here because they aren’t typically raised to have a working knowledge of their internal worlds; it’s less socially acceptable for men to talk about their feelings.”

She makes some great points with regards to skin hunger, jealousy of a spouse’s happiness which we are often ashamed to talk about because what does it say about someone’s character, rise abandonment issues, changing nature of relationships with our parents among other things.

” You know what three words are even more romantic to me than ‘I love you’?”
“You look beautiful” he tried. “No”, his wife said.
“I understand you“.

It’s an absolutely riveting and intimate book, eloquently put together, relatable and hilarious, making you either laugh out loud or chuckling ever so often and making you feel all sorts of emotions as you cheer for everyone in the book and is not at all preachy. She even touches upon a few disorders and common terms in therapy, explaining them quite succinctly and theories by certain scholars. Attaching the authors notes here, which might prove even more insightful.

“As I heal inside, I’m also becoming more adept at healing others.”

Buy your copy from your independent bookstore or here.

In the end I would just like to say-

You are valid
You matter
You are enough
You are appreciated and loved.

Whatever you are going through right now, will pass soon so just hang in there and keep fighting and going after things you want. Please do seek help if you feel like.

Embedding below a post I came across quite recently, related to therapists. Please click on the account below to see the rest of the posts. Some even provide sliding scale prices if someone doesn’t have enough resources to go for therapy.

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A post shared by therapize | therapy (@therapize.india)

Until next time, bye!